MasterCard Advisors Partners With Analytics Firm Mu Sigma On Big Data

The two companies announced a new partnership today to create new business intelligence by combining MasterCard’s consumer purchasing database with Mu Sigma’s analytics staff and techniques.

MasterCard Advisors, the advisory and consulting arm of MasterCard, is partnering with analytics firm Mu Sigma to develop new analytics products for business intelligence. To develop those new products the two companies will bring together MasterCard Advisor’s aggregated and anonymous consumer purchasing behavior insights with Mu Sigma’s analytics tools. MasterCard has acquired an equity stake in Mu Sigma as part of the partnership as well, according to a statement released today by MasterCard.

MasterCard Advisors already has a large aggregated transactions database that the company said it plans to leverage to deliver business intelligence and analytics solutions to a number of industry verticals, including financial institutions. With this deal that database will be combined with the 2500 decision science professionals who work on advanced analytics at Mu Sigma, which uses an inter-disciplinary approach to business analytics that combines business, math and its own proprietary technologies and methodologies.

MasterCard said that the deal would help the company compete in the growing big data market which it said would grow from $5 billion last year to $50 billion in the next five years, citing research from Wikibon, a free open source professional advisory community.

Jonathan Camhi has been an associate editor with Bank Systems & Technology since 2012. He previously worked as a freelance journalist in New York City covering politics, health and immigration, and has a master's degree from the City University of New York's Graduate School ... View Full Bio